EPISODE 22

Les and his brother Marty owned a little place in North Sea.  It was a 1920’s beach house, but the funny thing was that there was no beach there. Their front yard was a steep incline that emptied right into a calm stretch of the bay. There was a little boathouse and a spot where they could pull their aluminum dinghy out of the way of the incoming tide. Out in the bay though, lay their boat, an intrepid craft named Cruella.  Les was in very good humor that morning and he told me that had called a few friends, promising a fine fish luncheon at 2PM. When we set out in the dinghy, he informed me that it was my sacred duty, no – my entire reason for being, to help provide the mid-day meal.

Those of you who may not quite understand my reluctance to perform in front of others with a fishing rod, will now be treated to what we shall refer to as the Principle On CatchingFish In Full View of An Audience:

“The rate of an angler’s success is inversely related to the number of people taking note of what he is doing, divided by the number of currently visible fish.”

These are pretty crappy odds under normal circumstances. If you add to it the pressure of having to provide actual seafood for a given meal, it gets even worse. You have a better chance of being struck by a meteor on a balmy October evening while watching the Chicago Cubs win the World Series from the comfort of a hot tub located deep in the Hollywood Hills with Angelina Jolie cooing into your left ear.

The two of us set out that morning in Cruella to visit the world’s least cooperative seafood market, the Atlantic Ocean. We motored down to the mouth of North Sea Harbor and anchored off a point on the eastern shore. The tide was going out, creating a strong current. I made a few casts with my fly rod and realized quickly that if I was to have any chance for success, I was going to have to get my line down deep, all the way to the bottom.

I rigged a quarter ounce jig and a small plastic grub onto my leader, very much the same kind of thing I usually cast to smallmouth bass in the spring with my ultra light spinning rod. I swung the line out towards the harbor’s mouth and felt as the jig rapidly sank to the bottom. In only a few seconds, I could feel as the jig ticked along the floor, sweeping past the boat at a pretty fair clip.

Les was tossing a spoon lure with his spinning rod when I got the first strike. It was a sea scup, which Les derisively, although accurately, referred to as “bait”. Still, it was a start and we dropped the fish into the cooler on the deck, where it flopped about. Maybe 15 minutes later, I got another strike, but this was clearly a much larger fish. It ran with the current, towards the boat’s stern and then began to zigzag in the current. It took me a while to bring the fish in close and when I did, Les grabbed it, pulling the fish inside.  It was a two-foot long striped bass! This was great news. With a little luck, there might be a few keeper-sized fish (28 inches or better) mixed in the school. Lunch was looking like a possibility at least.

But Les had other ideas. He sat holding the striper, smiling kindly, as he reached under his seat and removed a white towel, which he gently wrapped the fish in. Then he thwacked the whole package against the side of the boat and stowed it in the cooler with the still thrashing scup.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled.

Les smiled at me. “Keep fishing, Mikey,” he replied. “We don’t have enough for lunch yet.”

I was appalled.  I started to protest, but Les interrupted me by pointing at the end of my line.

“Do you have more of these?” he asked with a smile, indicating the jig I had used to catch the utterly felonious fish that lay dead in the cooler.

I did and so I tossed a couple over to him. In a few more minutes, we were both bouncing our jigs through the current. It took a while, but after a half hour or so, I got another strike and again another doomed, undersized striped bass fled towards the stern of the boat, where Les pulled it in, wrapped it lovingly in a towel and then beat it to death before dispatching it with the rest of our illegal catch.

A pattern was developing.

I was now presented with the moral dilemma of enabling a pathological poacher while also really wanting nothing more than to continue fishing in what clearly were waters saturated with healthy (although prohibitively small) striped bass. I determined to rid myself of the thorny end of my predicament while preserving the fun of more good fishing.

I hooked into another fish in short order and steered it off to the starboard side of the boat before it had a chance to get too close to Les’s grasp in the stern. The fish fought well, which made Les particularly unhappy. I was delaying the delivery of the all-valuable main course for lunch and this was unforgivable. Meanwhile, I had contrived a strategy to deny him a third juvenile fish. The more I fought it off to the starboard side, the more tired the fish became and I was able to bring it in right at the bow.

Les reached out, positively beaming with delight at the bounty that lay in my hands. Lunch would be a feast to be remembered! But I managed to keep the fish away from him this time and as soon as I’d worked the jig free from the striper’s jaw, I placed it back in the water and watched as it sped away.

For several moments, I was reasonably sure that Les was carefully weighing the wisdom of placing mein the water as well. Being adults, we discussed the situation, using terse, somewhat profane language to exchange our opposing points of view. It quickly became apparent that my wish to release any other undersized fish we might catch struck him as bizarre, if not completely unreasonable behavior. Still, he recognized that we now had a couple of bass that were big enough to feed the crew he expected to come over that afternoon and when I reminded them that an unwelcome inspection by the harbormaster would most certainly result in massive fines for all involved, as well as the likely confiscation of his boat, he relented.

I can promise you though that luncheon that day was absolutely delicious. Forbidden fruit almost always is.

The next installment will be posted on February 3.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 21

           As I was driving out to the island the Friday afternoon before I was supposed to meet Les, I remember something my father said to me. “The secret to surfcasting,” he told me when I was about 12 years old, “is that no one ever catches anything.”

While this pronouncement may have been somewhat cynical advice to give to a young angler, in many ways it was also accurate. On its face value, surfcasting is a most unlikely exercise. A lone angler walks the beach with an oversized spinning rod and from time to time, he stares out at the vastness of the ocean, looking for some imperceptible sign that a fish, any fish might be swimming by, close enough to land that it could conceivably be reached by the length of a cast.

These are long, long odds indeed.

With that happy thought in mind, I headed out to do a little surfcasting by myself, even before I’d had the chance to stop by Les’ place.  I took the long route to my destination by driving to Bridgehampton first, to peruse the selection of fishing lures at K-Mart.  I found several Striper Delight plugs, which are essentially a half priced rendition of the famous Striper Swiper popper (any day you can buy an 8 dollar lure for 4 bucks is a great one, to my mind) and headed back towards Southampton.  I arrived at the beach at North Sea at around 6PM. The tide was ebbing and the water flat. A few terns were flying over one spot, about 200-300 yards from where I’d parked so, I tied on a surface plug and began to cast.

For a half hour, I contented myself with the knowledge that at any moment, a mighty 32-inch striped bass might charge at my lure, slapping at it as I set the hook into its jaw. I’d return as the conquering hero, the next evening’s dinner safely in my hands to be grilled over an open fire.

Grunt! Grunt! The Great Provider!

But my lure was left unmolested, except for the few times a pair of passing gulls swooped down at it. Nothing quite tastes like freshly roasted seagull. But I digress.

An hour passed. I had gone from anticipating the great striper to wishing for a not-so-enormous bluefish, to finding myself willing to settle for an anemic sea robin and still my lure suffered not. The North Sea beach is lovely, but I’d been turning the wisdom of my father’s words over and over in my head and I was feeling somewhat like a jackass.

I left the beach and at a little before 7:30PM, I arrived at the Shinnecock Canal. There were only a couple other anglers there, casting from the western edge of the canal across to the opposite side towards the Tide Runners restaurant. I love Tide Runners. It features good seafood, cold beer, and a perfect view of other people fishing. It also has a dock, and for no extra charge, you can watch as the sometimes-intoxicated weekend boaters attempt to slip their boats in without incident. I’ve seen some great crashes there, a couple good fistfights, while witnessing some truly amazing fish being taken, only a few yards away. For my money, it has to be the greatest show on earth.

I took out my newest rig, a 7-foot Fenwick HMG rod fitted with a Shimano Spheros 4000 spinning reel that I’d spun with 10-pound test line. I tied on one of the Striper Swipers that I’d picked up in Bridgehampton and tossed it at Tide Runners.

My first strike was at 8 o’clock. I watched as the fish came up through the water and took the surface plug in its mouth before heading under. It turned out to be a small striper, 20 inches long. I tossed it back, marked the spot where I’d hooked it in my mind and cast again.  The light was still good, which gave me plenty of time to work the surface with the plug and I figured I might have found a school of juvenile bass.  They would be more than a hell of a lot of fun to play with for the next forty-five minutes or so, until it became too dark to see.

Five minutes later, I had a tremendous strike. The fish quickly ran from north to south and I ran along the edge of the canal after it as the fish leaped full out of the water.

It was a bluefish and a pretty good sized one too. I noticed that the other couple of anglers who had been casting had pulled their lines in and were watching the fight. I usually perform quite badly in front of an audience and I half expected the fish to choose this moment to spit the lure back at me, perhaps imbedding one of the hooks in my leg, or some more embarrassing piece of my anatomy.

But it didn’t. To my amazement, I began to gain on it. The fish continued to run and I had to keep moving along the side of the canal to keep up. But very slowly, I felt the fish tire. Most of the fight, it had been near the surface and I was able to monitor its thrusts and runs by watching the tail and how it would suddenly seem to vibrate just as a run would begin. This gave me a huge advantage. I was actually able to anticipate the fish’s movements.

I brought my fish in and measured it: 24 inches! Since I wasn’t really a fan of the oily taste that distinguishes this species, I released it and continued casting.

I missed a couple strikes, some small “cocktail” blues, which looked to be a perhaps a foot and a half long. It appeared as though the larger bluefish had moved on. I noticed a strange sight though and stopped casting.  Out in the middle of the canal, I saw what appeared to be a large number of big fish, knifing through the water. Their movement was betrayed by the V-shaped wake they left and they were working in unison towards some common purpose. They were corralling the smaller bluefish.

The first explosion of the feeding frenzy took place just off to my right, against the canal wall about 100 feet from where I was standing. Before I could bring myself around to cast though, the fish broke, heading diagonally across the canal, towards the lock doors at the northern end of the canal. There, the smaller fish were pinned in and they leaped end over end into the air as the bigger fish slammed into them.

It was then that I realized that the “cocktail” blues were being chased by some truly enormous striped bass. I cast into the froth that the fish had made from all their jumping and thrashing, but they were off again, down the length of the canal at tremendous speed just as I began to retrieve. I chased after them, but whenever I set myself up to cast, off they broke again. It was as exciting as either of the two fights I’d enjoyed that evening. I stopped casting and just watched in the waning light as the stripers raced after the escaping bluefish, trapped them and then raced after them again once they broke free. I noticed that there wasn’t another angler on the canal. It was as if they were giving me a private show.

           A few minutes later, everything was calm again and there wasn’t a sign of life on the water. It was almost 9 at night and the real secret about surfcasting was waiting to explode again somewhere else, later on, hopefully when I met Les the next morning.

The next installment will be posted on January 27.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

 

EPISODE 20

I have always been into fishing and with New York being so close to the ocean, only about 100 miles from the fabled beaches, over priced real estate and the waters of the Hamptons, I figured it might make some sense to take a trip there.  I spent a lot of summers out there as a kid, visiting my aunt and uncle in Bridgehampton.  When I was in high school though, those visits tapered off as I discovered the wonderful world of recreational drugs and other types of anti-social behavior.  I went out to Long Island again a few times during the summer months when I was in college.  I had a couple of friends who owned a boat that they moored at North Sea Harbor in Southampton.  We’d go out on it early in the morning, looking for bluefish and striped bass, only to return in the early afternoon, red faced from all of the sun and red eyed from all the pot and beer we’d consumed.  It never occurred to us that our non-angling activities on the water might somehow have slowed our reflexes, thereby allowing the fish that actually did strike at our lines a more than even shot at escape.  

I decided to take up an offer from Les to join him on his Boston Whaler for a day of tooling around the waters between North Sea and the Shinnecock Inlet. Les had told me that he felt pretty guilty about the whole incident with Universal Hair and the car going down the elevator shaft.  So as a way to make him feel better about everything, he asked me if I wanted to go fishing.  I realized that this was as close to an apology as he was ever going to offer and that a fishing trip was also just exactly what I needed.  What the hell.  I’ve never been able to resist a chance to go fishing anyway.

Contrary to what you might think, I did not grow up in a family that fished together. Although it’s true that my mother taught me the basics of the double haul cast the summer I turned 12 (she handed me a seven and a half foot five weight rod and bade me cast it into the chlorine cleared waters of my grandfather’s backyard swimmingpool until I could do so without injuring myself or anyone within a twenty foot radius), in spite of this, “my people” were not of fishing stock.

That is not to say that nobody ever fished. When I was maybe ten years old, one of my father’s best friends bought a share of a fishing boat the he kept at the marina in East Boston. It was a beautiful craft and I was lucky enough to ride in it a few times, bottom fishing for scup and flounder. But every so often, my father’s pal would convince my father that it was a good idea for him to get out on the water and put in a half-day of real fishing.

My father would arise on these rare occasions at the appointed hour, well before dawn, a time of day he did not particularly love, except when it was duck-hunting season and even then I always felt that he did that reluctantly. He would quietly sneak out of the house, although he had clearly already awakened my mother by his rustling about, but of course since my brother and I slept through thunderstorms, we were totally oblivious to his departure.  He then made the two-hour drive from our home in White River Junction, Vermont to Boston.

Most of the time, the only way we were able to tell that my father had been out fishing at all was that he would be sleepy after he’d returned and that he smelled of beer. There was, however, one remarkable day.

I woke up that morning, headed out to the ditch that I’d dug next to the barn and tried to eke out another dozen or so earthworms from the dirt so I could go fishing in the Connecticut River for bass. I enjoyed a pleasant day of fishing and returned in the latter part of the afternoon. My younger brother was nowhere to be seen, the driveway was empty, and only the family dog was there to greet me as I walked into the kitchen. My mother had left a note, telling me to rummage through the refrigerator for lunch.

After snagging a bite to eat, I wandered down to the other end of the house to the bathroom nearest my parent’s bedroom. You couldn’t exactly call it their bathroom, since it was located along a common hallway in the house, but it was the one closest to where they slept, so my brother and I always knew it basically was their turf. But because it was in close proximity to the living room as well, everyone used it. I opened the door and was immediately overwhelmed by a strong and familiar smell.

No, it wasn’t the septic system backing up. The odor that so thoroughly pervaded that little room, even with the window opened wide, was of fish! Like the little boy in the old joke who dug through the pile of manure his parents had shoveled into his bedroom as punishment, searching for the pony that he just knew had to be buried there; I whipped my eyes around the room. There was a fish in the bathroom!

And after a few seconds, I saw it. Lying along the length of the bottom of the bathtub was the largest striped bass I’d ever seen in my short life. It was half covered with ice and the one eye that was exposed appeared clear and black. My father had caught this monster just a few hours before! I was so excited. My father could fish! Who knew?  I ran into my parent’s bedroom and found him there, passed out on the bed.  My decision not to wake him then, to tell him how proud I was of him, was entirely motivated by self-preservation.

The next installment will be posted on January 20.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 19

There was a pause now as Keith contemplated what he’d just heard.  Bosco knew this was the time to be quiet and he put his finger to his lips and looked at me carefully.  I nodded and waited for Keith to speak. 

“Now you think this is ‘sick’, right Michael?”

“Well, yeah.  Someone’s going to sue our guy and then where are we?”

“Why’s he going to sue?”  Keith was probing now and he was making sure that my objection was real.

“Well, you shaved his friggin’ head, didn’t you?”

“So what?” asked Bosco.  “Nobody forced him.  Hell, we even ask his permission, you okay with that?”

“Do we need to have him sign a release form?” Keith asked.

“Better than that.  We show him the service contract before we even start shaving.  We let him know everything about it.  We answer all his questions, heading off any other objections at the same time.  By the time he agrees to have the hair put on his head, he’s ready to sign the contract anyway.”

“But what do we have to protect our guy if the prospect gets pissed?” I persisted.

“You don’t need anything,” Bosco answered quickly.  “What’s he going to do, say that we drugged him and slapped a unit on his head while he was sleeping it off?”

“We’re not doing anything like that,” Keith responded quickly. 

“No we’re not,” I agreed.  “My point is that we need to protect ourselves in case we piss off the wrong prospect.”

“We’ll let the lawyers figure that one out,” Bosco said with a little smile.

“Fine, fine” said Keith.  He was gearing himself up for a final flurry of questions and this time his attention was entirely on Bosco.  He spoke slowly this time, like he was working on a difficult puzzle that he was close to finishing. 

“Bosco, how does all of this help us sell more units?  Now, before you answer that, I want you to consider that you’ve just made the goddamn things completely worthless by giving them all away.”

“Exactly!”  Bosco replied.  “We’ve shifted all of the value in the sales process to the service.  This makes the studio more valuable to the guy wearing our hair than ever before.  If the studio makes more on service and gets his clients into the habit of coming in every six weeks to make everything look good...”

“And this service plan is all pre-paid, right?” Keith interrupted.

“Right!  So there’s no excuse financially for the client not to come in.  Hell, he can come in every four weeks for all we care.  The more units the studio gives away as part of the prepaid service program, the more units we sell to the studio!”

You could almost hear Keith’s mind work on the other end of the line.  He was looking at Bosco’s proposal from every possible angle, looking for the flaw that would kill it.  I was doing the same thing, but I had to admit that I thought it was very clever.  None of us spoke as I watched Bosco lean forward to the speakerphone.  This was a tense moment and I had to marvel at how Bosco could keep himself in check.  A less disciplined man would have asked Keith a question, looking to surface any objection he might have, but Bosco knew that at this time, it was best to wait. 

A long minute passed before we heard anything out of the speakerphone.  Keith exhaled into his phone and then he heard him laugh.  Bosco sat upright and turned to me with a big smile on his face.  Keith began to laugh harder and then Bosco joined in.

“Brilliant, Bosco!” Keith exclaimed.  “No, no that’s really brilliant!  It’s so simple and so pure!”

“Thank you.”

“I swear to god, Michael, your old boss is the slickest operator in the world.  You’re a lucky guy to have spent so much time working with him.  There are people in our business who would pay…hell, who have paid a fortune to have him come in and work with them for just a few days.  And you’ve been with him for years.  Dammit!  You’re a goddamn genius, Bosco!”

Bosco was really animated now.  He was standing up and walking around the room, speaking loudly so that he could be heard on the speakerphone.

“The tough part is going to be training all of the studios how to get over their own belief that the hair is actually worth anything.  We’re going to have to work hard to beat this.  These guys spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on our hair and we have to get them used to spending even more.”

“You think we should send the salesmen out to their clients?” Keith asked.

“God, no!  Keith, you do that and this will all fail.  No, we have to offer them real education by qualified instructors.  PhDs.  I mean it.”

“Where the hell you gonna find a professor of sales?”

“You’re talking to him.”

“Oh Christ.”

“Come on, Keith.  Who the hell else knows this as well as I do?  No one!  We’ll run a three-day class somewhere, Vegas maybe.  We’ll invite them to come out and learn the greatest, most fantastic way to grow their businesses, charge ‘em a few bucks and they’ll climb over each other to get there.  Because nothing’s working, Keith.  They know it as well as we do.  The infomercials are failing.  The leads we’re getting from newspapers and TV suck.  Men are shaving their heads.  If we don’t do something to change the way hair is sold, a lot of these guys are going to go out of business and I know how much you don’t want that to happen.”

No, Keith didn’t want that.  I looked over at Bosco, who was looking intently at his telephone, waiting for the response.  It felt like a full minute passed before we heard anything.

“No, Bosco” Keith said softly.  “I sure as hell don’t.”

“So, we’re good?” Bosco asked.

“Hold on!” Keith said sharply.  “Let’s open this up and see what some other people think.  Michael?  I want you, Allen, Les and Bosco ready to talk about this in an hour.  I’m going to get something to eat here and I’ll call in then.”

That would mean that Keith would be sated with a nice meal, some nice wine and perhaps he’d even be a bit groggy at a little after 9PM Manila time while we’d all be growling for coffee in New York.  These were the prescribed ingredients for any successful meeting at Slip-Not when Keith was out of town.  But we were in no position to argue the point.

The next installment will be posted on January 13.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.